Devotional #2

2008 Olympian Doug Schwab

Endure hardness as a Good Soldier of Jesus Christ

II Timothy 2:3-5

"Join with me in suffering, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. ⁴ No one serving as a soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs, but rather tries to please his commanding officer. ⁵ Similarly, anyone who competes as an athlete does not receive the victor’s crown except by competing according to the rules"



My name is Todd Tiffin and Rob asked me to write a devotional for his blog. I live in Tecumseh OK and have been involved with athletics all my life. I wrestled in High School and was an amateur boxer for awhile and coached my sons, one thing I learned competing and coaching was that in order to be prepared for success there were some difficult things that I had to train myself to endure. Competing in physical contests require a certain amount of skill and physical stamina if you want to be victorious. These things are cultivated by training.
     Often training is simply doing the thing you will compete at over and over again, even to the point of exhaustion. Eventually your level of fatigue will decrease as your strength and cardiovascular system grow accustomed to the activity. Though this process your body resists the difficulty you are forcing it to engage in and your mind will try to cause you to stop or take it easy. Elite athletes train themselves to overcome these impulses and press through the pain in order to achieve a higher level of proficiency.
     In life there are many opportunities, many choices that are set before us. Sometimes these choices are easy to make and other times they seem difficult or dangerous. Occasionally situations require us to sacrifice things we enjoy, to do what we believe is the right thing to do. The line between what is right or best, and what is wrong or less than best is not always easy to distinguish. Often there seems to be a reward or advantage if we choose to compromise in what we believe to be the right action to take, or the right choice to make.
     Paul writing to his young protégé knew the common struggle that all men face. He knew that the inner man is trained much like the body. The compromises we fall to, do something to us inside, weaken our resolve, make it easier to fail again. He reminds Timothy to resist the impulse to be “entangled with the affairs of this life”. In order to become the man that God wants us to be you and I must train ourselves to resist becoming tangled up in sinful choices that “war against our soul”. They weaken us, sap our strength, causing us to be dull and easily overcome.
     Mastering ourselves is a lifelong pursuit. Striving for mastery over the temptations to take the shortcuts or compromise the truth calls for deep character inside. Requires us to choose to walk the ancient path, believing that God is leading us to the destination, the destiny, we were made to reach.
Press on.